Paleobiologist Victoria Herridge stumbled upon this ridiculous photo while conducting a Google image search for an elephant skull. "I am dying," she later tweeted. "This is both depressing & incredibly funny."

Another layer of ridiculousness: the replicas are at times misidentified – e.g., this "cave bear" skeleton that Ross Barnett, an expert in Pleistocene-era megafauna, says is most definitely not a cave bear skeleton:

In addition to working on such such saurian film and television projects as Carnosaur and…
Read more Read more

So what do we make of this? Is this just yet another example of how sex is used to sell just about anything these days, or is there something inherently alluring about ancient skeletons? Is this some shade of geek-kink that we were previously unaware of, or is it just some variation on the human-remains-oriented paraphilia that we've reported on in the past?